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Speech Impediment

I wrestle with the door, which is entirely too high strung to be welcoming. My satchel slides off my shoulder and compresses with a clank on the concrete sidewalk. The ground is farther away than I remember. I hoist it up again and dance awkwardly using my foot and elbow to get though the threshold. In tow, I drag my overnight bag. The handle isn’t tall enough, so I have to walk a little contorted. An expressionless young woman has been watching this unfold. She perks up behind the counter once I’m through. She darts around, deftly preparing for our exchange. She looks to be sixteen. ‘Julie’ is stitched in cursive white below a screen printed logo of a river or stream. She’s wearing a dark green polo and her hair in a pony tail. Blonde frizz dapples her temple’s hairline.  “Okay great.” She doesn’t miss a beat. “Let’s see. Says here your room’s already paid for.” The frantic chatter of an inkjet starts and...

OFF THE WALL: LET THEM EAT CUPCAKES

Free cupcakes. It’s good bait, what can I say? But then I saw the art and realized, these people are not playing around. Giant circular convex mirrors, projection screen fractal fish, and massive globs of marbled paint smeared all along the walls, ceiling and floors. It all began last Thursday. Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts held the opening of the Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Katrina McElroy creates her art using video stills that capture moments of dramatic emotion. The images are then printed out onto different sizes of vinyl circles that she then adheres to the walls.

“The moments that seem on a scale of either importance or how much you’re feeling, the ones that are the greatest whether its extreme grief or extreme pain or extreme joy, those are often in terms of time of our lives, the most minimal. It’s like those are the special moments, whether they’re considered either negative or positive moments.”